Making Time - Part One

There are unfortunately only 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365-ish days a year. Like most people, I usually feel busy and my activities somehow expand to fit the time available. Sometimes I even feel out of control of this process. It's important to take a step back now and again and evaluate where your time is going.

Time is a precious, finite resource. You owe it to yourself to invest it in ways that you feel good about. That said, most of us waste tons of time. Believe me, I'm not saying we should all be productive every minute - I love doing nothing and I value having unstructured times for loafing and idling. I even schedule nothing time into my calendar! But when I do nothing, I want to enjoy the heck out of these sweet nothing moments and get my time's worth, not just dimly fritter away lots of time in ways that are not fun, productive, or meaningful. When I'm doing something, I want it to be worthwhile and effective.

The best way to create time in your life long-term is to do a thorough, mindful inventory of your values, goals, roles and commitments and align your time to what matters most to you. However, you can also or additionally apply a down-and-dirty triage approach to just quickly cutting down on the biggest time-wasters - kind of like losing weight by cutting out the worst empty calories from your habitual diet. I approach this time-waste triage by applying time management principles-- taking an area that I've labelled a time suck, and applying these three principles:

• Build awareness -  Monitor yourself for a week without changing your behavior to see how much time you spend in this activity, and what triggers you to engage in it.

• Reduce, restructure and repurpose -  Decide you'll do it less, and place a clear conscious limit on how much time you'll spend on something. Find substitute behaviors to use as a response when you are triggered. Add a new activity to your life to make sure you get good use out of the time you've gained, so that you don't end up finding another way to waste it :)

• Make it efficient -  Get the most out of the time you do spend in this area by using it as efficiently as possible.

Stay tuned for my next post in which I'll demonstrate how you can apply these principles to some common time leaks.